Ack now hosted on GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Ack now hosted on GitHub

github.com

22 pointsmgrouchy18 comments

It'd be nice if these sort of links on github went to a nice friendly "What the hell is Ack?" page. With a nice summary of the project etc. Like in the big green "Sign up to github" box maybe? So people can see at a glance what the project is about.

I know there's a README after some scrolling, but it's not really obvious. There's a load of hex strings which seem a bit premature, and a source list which again assumes I know what the project is all about...

I kinda prefer how google code shows things :/

eg http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/

I could have always have pointed it at the actually readme http://github.com/petdance/ack/blob/master/README

I just thought in this case the root of the project might have made more sense. Maybe they should put an excerpt from the README under the standard project blurb with name, homepage and clone url.

That's not much better for me, still half a page of 'stuff' before the README starts :)

I didn't mean to derail the thread though, but it's always irritated me about github links. I click on one and have no clue what the hell the project is.

/me is off to checkout ack (Haven't used it before, and looks useful).

It's a nice way of linking when you know what you're going to get but it's a lousy introduction to a project.

http://github.com/petdance/ack#readme

You just scroll half a screen down and you get a nice

> README > > ack is a grep-like tool tailored to working with large trees of source code.

Github is about code first and foremost. So it makes sense to have the code up front and center. Projects who want doc on github will fill in the wiki and link to that instead of the tree.

http://betterthangrep.com

Ack is a joy. It's almost completely displaced my use of grep for code related purposes now.

Indeed. It turns out that Defaults Matter. Who knew?

I've been using Ack tons, love it. However, I don't like the --notext default. I find that I specify --text almost every time. Just wanted to give everyone a headsup that this is the case: I introduced some bugs in my app when I missed a whole bunch of .txt templates for plain text email variants.

Ah, but ack supports an options file, so you can actually change your own defaults. Consider adding "--text" to "$HOME/.ackrc". In case you want more, specify just one option per line.

Thanks for the tip. I assumed that this existed, but hadn't gotten around to looking for it yet. My point, however, was to confirm that defaults do, in fact, matter :-)

"Defaults Matter" really is a key part of ack, and I thank you for crystallizing it for me.

I would love to quote this on the betterthangrep.com page. Would you please drop me a line at andy@petdance.com and give me your name and an OK?

I've heard that people love it but haven't made the leap yet. What does it do that makes it significantly better than grep?

Perl regexes, highlighted search terms, also serves as a find replacement, ignores VCS files by default.

It was built with programmers in mind.

For large code bases, it's worth setting up OpenGrok: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/opengrok/

I'm new to github. When I go to download it ("Downloads" tab at github) and click "latest" "tgz"; why do I get "petdance-ack-$extremely_long_number.tar.gz" instead of "ack-1.9.0.tar.gz"?

Same thing happens if I click the curvy-cornered "download" button with the little green downward-pointing arrow.

It is the latest commit identifier. Dont bother about it, its a normal, tar.gz file.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com